Apple could make a great leap forward in laptop battery life

Apple will ultimately select the best processor at the time they wish to release an update. This growing battle between ARM and Intel in the mobile sector, and soon in the desktop sector too, is going to benefit Apple in the long run. It might even be a difficult choice come mid-2012 when a final decision to go with ARM or Intel will most likely be made.
At the moment Apple splits its processor usage between an ARM solution for portable gadgets and Intel solution for desktops and Apple A1060 Battery. But SemiAccurate has been told that may change in the future with Apple considering moving its laptops over to an ARM processor, which inevitably leads to the question of whether desktops will follow too?
In the next year or so, Intel will release an update to Sandy Bridge called Ivy Bridge. This new generation of processors will utilize Intel's new 3D transistor technology on a 22nm process, bringing either significant power savings in low voltage designs, speed improvements at higher voltages, or some combination of the two. Effectively, Intel could make a 22nm clone of Sandy Bridge processors with identical performance at close to 50 percent of the power requirements. Imagine the performance of today's MacBook Pro with something like double the battery life—there's a lot more to it than just the CPU power requirements, but you get the idea.
By building its own custom ARM-based chips, it's at least possible that Apple could make a great leap forward in laptop battery life compared to the rest of the industry. (The iPad already has strikingly better battery performance than other tablets based on non-custom ARM processors.)
Such a move would be a blow for Intel, but could benefit Apple due to the very low power requirements of ARM chips. That in turn would allow for a gain in battery life while a performance comparison with Intel chips would have to wait until such a laptop appeared on the market.
All of you complainers saying ARM isn't powerful enough realize Sony's new NGP will be running on a QUAD CORE ARM processor, right? And that's coming out THIS year! So why says a hexi core or an octo core ARM processor won't be out in 2 or 3 years? Plus, this has everything to do with heat and power management. Apple's big thing is having low heat, extreme Apple A1079 Battery and power efficiency with their products so this might make a huge difference. Of course Intel could have 1nm processors by then but none of us knows exactly what's' gonna happen and when.
OS X already runs magnificently on ARM chips–in the form of iOS, which is a variant of OS X as it runs on Macs, not an unrelated operating system. Bringing full-blooded OS X to ARM wouldn't be an entirely new challenge.
We know for a fact that Apple likes to be as deeply involved in the technology inside its devices as possible–that's why it uses custom processors based on ARM's technology inside the iPhone and iPad. Intel's upcoming chips based on “3D” technology sound neat, but they'll always be Intel chips, not Apple chips.
A major benefit in ARM's favor over x86 processors is that they currently provide mobile devices with ample performance combined with extremely long Apple A1022 Battery life. So from this perspective, a laptop running current generation low-power ARM processors would get amazing battery life in exchange for constrained performance.
On iPhones and iPads, which only one run application at a time, we accept this trade off. It doesn't seem likely that users are ready to make that sacrifice when using Mac OS X (at least, not yet). Conversely, pushing ARM processors to Core2 Duo-like performance would erase most, if not all, of ARM's low-power benefits, and would suck juice from a laptop's battery about as quickly as comparable x86 processors.